I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

August 15, 2012

Summer Shorts Remains a Summer Treat

Summer is supposed to be the quiet season for New York
theatergoers but somebody apparently forgot to send that memo to the folks who
organized all the theater festivals that have been going on around town these
past few weeks.

And now we’ve got the New York
International Fringe Festival, which began last Friday and will present nearly 200
different shows before it closes on Aug. 26. I’m scheduled for a three-show marathon today
and plan to post about what I see on Saturday.

In the meantime, my favorite summer theater festival may be Summer Shorts,
the series of original short plays that opened a four-week run at the 59E59
Theaters last week. There are only
six plays in the festival and they’re presented in bills of three (Series A and
Series B) on alternate nights. And you don’t have to travel around from place to
place to see them as you do with other festivals because all the Summer Shorts
offerings are presented on the same stage.

The playwrights, directors, actors and designers who mount
these shows tend to be pros with solid Broadway and off-Broadway credits so
there’s a polish to Summer Shorts productions despite obviously limited
budgets. In fact, each play is the theatrical equivalent of an amuse-bouche, a
little treat that doesn’t pretend to be a full meal but still offers a
satisfying taste of the playwright’s specialties.

The play groupings aren’t usually meant to be thematic but
Series B, the trio I saw, might easily have been called Series G, for each of
the three playlets involves gay characters in comic situations.

Two masters of high-camp humor, playwright Paul Rudnick and
actor Peter Bartlett, join forces in Cabin Pressure, a monologue about a gay
flight attendant who is being awarded for having thwarted a terrorist attack on
his flight. Rudnick riddles the acceptance speech with non-sequitur zingers about hedge fund managers
and movie celebrities, and Bartlett, under the gleeful direction of Walter
Bobbie, nails almost every one of them.

Next up is Love and Real Estate, a mini-musical by Sam
Davis, a frequent Broadway conductor who has branched into composing his own shows, and Sean
Hartley,a book writer and lyricist whose best known credit is Little Women.
They’ve updated the Three Little Pigs story to modern-day Manhattan: the
piggies are now the three human Bacon sisters played by Stephanie D’Abruzzo, Sarah Corey
and Jessica Hershberg; the wolf is a sly guy (Kevin Greene) who woos all three
siblings and Edward Hibbert plays an Into the Woods-style narrator, whose role is more
than it seems. I can’t remember
even one song from the show but its silly antics still make me smile.

Neil LaBute is a Summer Shorts regular and he’s back with
his trademark misogyny in The Furies, a tale about an older and recently out
gay man (Victor Slezak) whose attempt to break up with his younger lover (J.J.
Kandel) arouses the suspicion and the vengeance-is-mine fury of the lover’s sister, played with
comic finesse by Alicia Goranson.

Altogether, the three plays lasted a total of just 90 minutes. Afterward, I walked over to Madison Avenue, caught a bus
uptown and stopped in the 90s to have dinner at Paola's, an Italian place that my
husband K and I used to like a lot but haven't been to for a while. I got an outside table, ordered a nice bowl
of pasta and a chilled glass of wine. In every way, a light, easy and savory summer evening.